Home is Loud

Home Is A Fire

Zion

All At Once

All at once

the world can overwhelm me.

There's almost nothing that you could tell me

that could ease my mind.

Which way will you run?

When it's always all around you,

and the feeling lost and found you again;

a feeling that we had no control.

Around a sun, some say,

"it's gonna be the new hell,"

some say,

"it's still too early to tell,"

some say,

"it really ain't no myth at all."

Keep askin' ourselves,

"are we really

strong enough?"

There's so many things

that we got

too proud of.

We're too proud of...

We're too proud of...

I wanna take the preconceived

out from underneath your feet,

and we can shake it off

and instead we'll plant some seeds.

We'll watch 'em as they grow,

and with each new beat

from your heart the roots grow deeper

the branches, well, they reach

for what?

Nobody really knows,

but underneath it all

there's this heart all alone.

And what about when it's gone?

It really won't be so long.

Sometimes it feels like a heart

is no place to be singing from at all.

There's a world we've never seen,

there's still hope between the dreams;

the weight of it all

could blow away with the breeze.

If you're waitin' on the wind,

don't forget to breathe

'cause as the darkness gets deeper

we'll sink, and so we reach

for love;

at least something we can hold.

But i'll reach to you from where

time just can't go.

And what about when it's gone?

Oh, it really won't be so long.

Sometimes it feels like a heart

is no place to be singing from at all.

Jupiter and Mercury

I daydream about lying under a star-filled mountain sky, feeling the cool night air tingle across our faces, tracing out routes between points of light that traverse the constellations.

[photo via]

Weekend Hangover

A Proper House

The buildup from 1:41 to 2:14 is my favorite.

Animal Collective - My Girls from Rob Chesnutt on Vimeo.

Take Everything

Greg Laswell, why are you so cool?

Greg Laswell "Take Everything" from Vanguard Records on Vimeo.

Salton

I took a field trip yesterday for the first time since going to see "King Lear" during senior year of high school. My seismology class headed out east of San Diego to check out some of the major faults, including a trace of the San Andreas, as well as some other cool geologic / seismological features. I'll do my best to recollect what we saw and its importance below, via pictures, of course.

Surface trace of the Elsinore Fault just northeast of Julian, CA, as it follows the creek in the bottom of the valley (not shown) as well as the linear "shoulders" in the hillside (center of photo).

Looking out over the Salton Trough near Borrego Springs.

Coyote Mountain and the Santa Rosas. Coyote has one trace of the San Jacinto fault along its western (facing) edge, while another trace abuts the western edge of the Sta. Rosas.

Fresh Imperial Valley grapefruits.

Trace of a splinter of the the San Jacinto along the west face of Coyote Mtn.

Evidence for 1 to 2 km of offset along the right splinter of the San Jacinto just east of Borrego Springs: an alluvial fan that has been shifted northwest (Pacific plate motion) in the last 1 to 2 million years. The Google Earth view (33.314965181082314, -116.2075424194336) is much better.

Looking southeast along the same offset.

The old shoreline of a full Salton Sea is about 12 m above sea level, right at the base of these hills.

The view of the Salton Sea from Travertine Rock is actually quite nice until you think about how polluted the water actually is.

Travertine-coated rock, meaning this used to be underwater during a previously-full version of the Salton Sea. The migrating delta of the Colorado River tends to fill - and then eventually empty - the entire trough once every 500 years or so.

Orocopia schist outcropping in Box Canyon, northeast of Mecca (CA). These rocks are important because they represent a major tie point to similar features in the San Bernadinos, giving good evidence for the estimated +/- 315 km of offset on the San Andreas in the last 10 million years or so.

Surface trace of the San Andreas in the Mecca Hills, near the mouth of Painted Canyon, represented by large mounds of fault gouge.

Looking roughly southward from the mouth of Painted Canyon toward the Salton Sea.

Close-up of fault gouge along the San Andreas. SO COOL.

Pretty much standing on top of the San Andreas fault, if not slightly to the east. Hello, North American continental plate!

Major folding due to transpression along this part of the San Andreas.

Checking out some of the distortion due to transpression in the kinks of the fault.

The mouth of the Painted Canyon. It was pushing 100F at this point. Something about mad dogs and Englishmen...

The canyon was actually very pretty and I'd love to go back sometime during October through March.

Lots of folded gneiss in the canyon.

Looking up and out.

Our farthest point in the hike. Just above the ladders traversing the dry falls was a huge swarm of bees.

Checking out some mud pots at the south end of the Salton Sea, a hot spot which acts as a young spreading axis between the Imperial and San Andreas fault systems (I think).

Little baby mud volcanoes.

Caught this one in action! Apparently they're much more impressive during the wet season in wintertime.

Big ol' mud pot. Sounds like the makings of a spa.

Surface trace of an old rupture along the Superstition Hills part of the Imperial Fault - this was really cool!

Not a bad culmination to a long day of driving and sight-seeing.

Sunset over the desert before heading back west to the coast.

Codex

CODEX RADIOHEAD from Milo Tucker on Vimeo.

Cookies

I tried out this recipe today for corn flake cookies and I think they turned out great so, here's to sharing the sweet-tooth love.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup butter
• 1 cup vegetable oil (I substituted corn oil)
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 cup crushed corn flakes
• 1 cup chopped nuts (I substituted the nuts with mini chocolate chips!)
• 1 cup quick-cooking oatmeal
• 4 cups flour (slightly less for chewier cookies)
• 1 tablespoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 325F.
2. Cream butter, sugars, vanilla, and egg.
3. Add oil.
4. Mix in dry ingredients.
5. Place dough by heaping spoonfuls on to ungreased pan.
6. Bake for 10-12 minutes.
7. Cool on pan for a minute or two, then transfer to a rack to cool.

[source]

These cookies are great because the cake part is soft and moist but the corn flakes stay crunchy even after cooking. The texture gradient is nice, plus the oats and brown sugar give them some really good flavor.

Bon appetit!

Renewal

It took a lot of energy to keep this thing going, once upon a time, with regular narratives providing updates about my life. That kind of writing style wears on you, having to recap days, weeks, months of goings-on, and for what real benefit? I found that the narrative wasn't enough on its own, since it was really just a framework for all the emotions that trickled in between without actually exposing those feelings. So I stopped writing for a number of reasons: it was too much work, not gratifying in the way I'd hoped, and seemingly unimportant to fit detailing the day-to-day into the day-to-day.

This is me saying that I'm not going to pick back up where I left off.

I'd rather use this space for the things that I find more important than the daily narrative, the things that make me think, laugh, cry, or just help me through. So, that being said, you might get a picture, a YouTube video, or a news article. Who knows what I'll find, but it's sure to be important to me if it ends up here.

I came here wanting to post a list of songs I've thrown together as a good playlist for catharsis at the end of a long day. They're mostly on the sad to somber side of things but I'm unapologetic for keeping practiced in feeling a range of emotions.

• "To Be the One" - Idaho
• "Black River" - Amos Lee
• "What If You" - Joshua Radin
• "Codex" - Radiohead
• "The Shadowlands" - Ryan Adams
• "King of the Earth" - John Ondrasik
• "Coffee and Cigarettes" - Augustana
• "The Maker Makes" - Rufus Wainwright
• "re: Stacks" - Bon Iver
• "Indiana" - Jon McLaughlin
• "Broken Bones" - Aqualung